Death Lessons...

 Death is a troublesome thing in role playing games. In a table top combat exercise devoid of any outside consequence death is merely losing. But in an ongoing story with ties to specific characters death is more than just having to re-roll a new character.

Back in first edition I gamed in a campaign where the object of the current quest was to find a staff of the magi for our wizard. Midway though the adventure the wizard was killed. We all sat around the table in what was probably a very stupidly comical moment. Sitting there and thinking "oh... right... uh... so um, what do we do now?"

Well we learned then that we had to resurrect the wizard, of course. And so we pooled out magical items and traveled far out of our way to find a church that would be both willing to perform the ceremony and capable of doing it. I think back then you had to pay the cost of losing a year off of the caster's life so it cost us very dearly to pay a stranger to do it for us. But with great sacrifice we got it done and we had our wizard back at long last!

A session later he was dead again.

Deaths like these happened often enough that we began to gloss over role playing them at all. Or role playing the trek to get them rezzed at all, really. And soon after that we got tired of even paying the magical item price for the spell itself. So finally we invented the "f***ed-up system" as we called it. In this system you paid the price of death in lowering your stats, but we completely glossed over the magical item and experience point cost. We imagined it like you were in a coma. At first you still needed a week to heal up properly. Then that went away too. Then we got tired of lowering stats too.

Basically over time we whittled death down to just about nothing. Today, in this same group, twenty years later, playing 4th edition, "dying" means you have to take an extended rest after you reach a hit point total of negative your bloodied value - that's it.

Why?

Because we want to get on with the story.

We want to move forward and have fun being the heroes, not the failed heroes. In terms of story cohesion it was one of the best things that we could have done. It also sped up the game. How? No more obsessing over every little detail ensuring that we had outwitted the DMs attempts at killing us off. Which ate away hours and hours of gaming time. And as time between sessions got longer and longer as life intervened over the many years it served its purpose well by allowing us to milk ever hour of playing to the fullest.

Only now when the whole party dies does it still mean something. A Total Party Kill usually translates into: "Er.... it was... all just a bad dream? Do over!" And even more lately it means not even bothering to do it over and just moving on to the next encounter.

But we still always wanted our combats to be exciting. To that end we always ride the high end of the difficulty mark to get our jollies. When 4th edition came out we had to do a lot of number crunching to figure out where our sweet spot lay. Right now a low-end encounter is two to three levels above the party level. With a difficult encounter being four to five levels above.

We may not die... but we do live on the edge.

And it's the living that's the important thing.